Fishing for Resilience

Management approaches that focus on social–ecological systems—systems comprised of ecosystems, landscapes, and humans—are needed to secure the sustainability of inland recreational fisheries without jeopardizing the integrity of the underlying social and ecological components. Resilience management can be useful because it focuses on providing recreational capacity for fishermen under a variety of conditions while assuring that the social–ecological system is not pushed to a critical threshold that would result in a new, undesired system regime. Resilience management is based on a system perspective that accounts for the possible regimes a system could manifest. It aims to enhance system properties that allow continued maintenance of the system in a desired regime in which multiple goods and services, including recreational capacity, are provided. In this forum paper, we provide an overview of the potential of a resilience approach to the management of recreational fisheries and highlight the scientific and administrative challenges to its successful implementation. 467 digitalcommons.unl.edu 468 P o P e , A l l e n , & A n g e l e r i n T r a n s a c T i o n s o f T h e a m e r i c a n f i s h e r i e s s o c i e T y 143 (2014) of coupling between them—to effectively manage the social–ecological system. For example, lakes with minor development of recreational fisheries are scattered throughout the Nebraska Sandhills and have loosely coupled social and ecological components, i.e., the interactions are relatively weak and often nonlinear and effects of one component on the other are often indirect (e.g., McCarraher 1960; Jolley et al. 2013). In contrast, reservoirs with major development of recreational fisheries are present throughout the Tennessee River and its associated tributaries and have tightly coupled social and ecological components (e.g., Ray 1949; Jakus et al. 2000). The management of social–ecological systems requires contextspecific approaches (e.g., Olsson et al. 2004); recognizing the system properties inherent in the social and ecological components of each system is necessary. Increasing connectivity through increased human mobility and the prevalence of social media, increasing human population, and increasing ecological perturbations (in the forms of biological invasions, climate change, and altered biogeochemical cycles) challenge our current management paradigms. We suggest that a resilience-based management approach offers viable solutions for the management of inland fisheries that are primarily targeted for recreation. Resilience theory has matured, and management actions to enhance the resilience of recreational fisheries can now be suggested, though there is still much to be learned about operationalizing resilience theory. Here we put resilience theory into context, present general management actions, and discuss the implications of managing inland recreational fisheries for resilience. We regard a recreational fishery as a system wherein two complex components, the social component and the ecological component (Figure 1), depend on each other and broadly interact along multiple spatial and temporal dimensions. This contrasts with traditional views, in which only interactions among biota, habitats, and human users are considered. Our view does not just simply move the human users into a social category and combine biota and habitats into an ecological category; people are obviously integral to both components. Further, our view explicitly recognizes that there are numerous, complex, and often nonlinear linkages between the social and ecological components of recreational fisheries (Holmlund and Hammer 1999; Hammer et al. 2003; Hunt et al. 2011) that need to be accounted for in the management of such fisheries. Independent enhancement of either social resilience or ecological resilience generally does enhance social–ecological resilience, though not as efficiently as a directed enhancement of the two together (Adger 2000); even so, it is often easier to think about and discuss the components of social–ecological resilience. We do envision rare cases in which increasing the resilience of one component could decrease the resilience of the other and possibly alter the resilience of the system as a result. This paper is not prescriptive; rather, it presents an argument for the applicability of a resilience approach to recreational fisheries and an exploration of the forms such an approach might take.